Cyber unicorn Cyera acquires five-month-old startup Genie Security in $50 million deal
Israeli startup with just five employees joins cybersecurity company’s acquisition spree.
Five months after it was founded and with just five employees, Israeli startup Genie Security has been acquired for an estimated $50 million, Calcalist has learned. The buyer is cybersecurity company Cyera, which was valued at $9 billion in its latest funding round and is in the midst of an aggressive acquisition spree that has already included five companies.
Just a month ago, Cyera announced its fourth acquisition: Israeli startup Ryft, another young company founded in 2024 with only 15 employees, acquired for an estimated $100 million. Combined with earlier acquisitions, including Trail Security for $162 million, as well as Otterize and Shape AI, Cyera has rapidly expanded its operations, tripling its workforce to roughly 1,500 employees across 15 countries.
Genie Security, which until now operated largely under the radar, develops endpoint-based data protection technology. The company bears similarities to Base44, Maor Shlomo’s startup acquired by Wix for $80 million less than a year after its founding. Genie raised just $3 million in Seed funding led by Mensch Capital and Dynamic Loop. Angel investors included Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz, which was acquired by Google for $32 billion, as well as executives from cybersecurity companies including Okta and Elastic.
The acquisition marks a rapid and lucrative exit for Genie’s founders, CEO Nadav Noy, 30, and CTO Noam Dotan, 31, as well as the company’s small team. Like many founders of startups acquired by Cyera, Noy is a veteran graduate of Unit 8200, where he led projects that received the Israel Defense Award. Dotan is a graduate of the IDF’s Matzov unit and was part of the founding team at cybersecurity startup Legit Security, where he first met Noy. The two founded Genie following extensive reserve duty service after the October 7 attacks.
Despite its short existence, Genie had already developed a commercial product deployed across hundreds of endpoints in organizations in Israel and the United States. The company’s technology installs directly on organizational endpoints and identifies, in real time, and identifies attempts to leak sensitive information, whether through human actions or the use of generative AI tools such as Claude and similar systems.
Following the acquisition, Genie’s team, including its founders, will join Cyera’s enterprise data loss prevention (DLP) division, focusing on expanding endpoint data security capabilities. Genie’s technology will be integrated into Cyera’s broader platform, which the company says is already deployed in 20% of Fortune 500 companies.
The acquisition comes amid growing concern across the cybersecurity industry over how generative AI tools are reshaping the movement of information inside organizations. As employees increasingly use AI systems in day-to-day work, companies are struggling to monitor and control the flow of sensitive data. In many cases, routine actions such as uploading information into AI tools can create significant data leakage risks without organizations realizing it.
